Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/99

DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 63 Under the Empire many Oriental cults were spread abroad both in the East and West, which exerted upon many people an attraction greatly superior to the hold that the outworn formalities of the Oriental municipal worship had upon them. These East- re lglons ern religions were not state worships. They aimed at sal- vation of the individual rather than the prosperity of a social or political group, such as the tribe or town. In many cases they were open to any one, even to slave as well as to foreigner, instead of being restricted to a limited number of citizens. They offered to their initiates as a compensation for external ills a feeling of inner satisfaction and the hope of a better life after death. The ordinary civic religion, although it stimulated a devout patriotism, does not seem to have controlled man's private life very successfully, or at least had ceased to do so by the time of the Empire. We have seen that there was much sensuality and sexual excess in ancient society. Now there seems to have been a reaction against this ; men felt sinful and desired to find some means of purification from their guilt. The Oriental worships offered men, upon the basis of a revelation supposedly divine and authoritative, a personal redeemer by whose aid and by following whose example and previous experience, as recounted in some sacred legend, they too could, through symbolic rites and sacramental mysteries and acts of pen- ance, become purified from sin and evil, enjoy moments of emotional ecstasy even in this life, and after death win an immortal union with a deity outside and above our present world. The Egyptian cult of Isis had its baptisms and fasts, its liturgy and prayer-book, its well-organized priesthood with tonsure and vestments, and its Mother-Goddess who had herself been through sufferings and who longed to relieve suffering humanity. In the Metamorphoses of Apu- leius she appears to the hero in a miraculous vision and says, " Lo, Lucius, I am come, moved by thy supplication, I, nature's mother, mistress of all the elements, the first be- gotten offspring of the ages. ... I am come in pity for y woes." Other widely disseminated cults than that of ,h